Evolution

Mon March 20, 2017, 7:30 PM

11-year-old Nicolas lives with his mother in a seaside housing estate. The only place that ever sees any activity is the hospital. It is there that all the boys from the village are forced to undergo strange medical trials that attempt to disrupt the phases of evolution.

Some movies revel in mysteries so well that they don’t require
solutions. French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s “Evolution”
provides an ideal example. Ten-year-old Nicolas (Max Brebant)
spends his days in an isolated seaside hospital, along with
several other children, all of whom are subjected to an alarming
medical process. His mother, and the other women who tend to the
boys, obscure the reasons behind the confined setting. When
Nicolas spies on them after dark, he gets no closer to answers —
but the puzzle pieces gradually congeal into a pileup of
transgressive sexuality, body horror and strange laboratory
experiments. Nicolas doesn’t put it all together, but as he learns
to look harder, he takes action against the ominous events around
him. It’s the year’s wildest coming of age story.

Buried in the Vanguard section of the Toronto International Film
Festival last year, “Evolution” defies simple categorization.
Hadzihalilovic’s long-awaited followup for her 2004 debut
“Innocence,” the new movie plays like a wondrous dream constantly
on the verge of a nightmare. Max lives on a rocky island with a
few other puny kids who get stashed away in a barren room each
night and subjected to peculiar experiments during the day. Only a
sympathetic nurse (Roxane Duran) supports Max’s curiosity about
the nature of his environment and helps him uncover the truth. But
that doesn’t make his situation any more comfortable.

Initially, Max’s surroundings have a utopian quality, with
Belgian cinematographer Manuel Dacosse capturing the boy swimming
through reefs with neon-green glow. Then he glimpses a dead body
and a tale of mounting suspicion takes flight.

The simplicity of Max’s existence is less comforting than eerie
as the questions keep coming: Why does his mother and a hordes of
stone-faced, uniformly dressed women attend to his every need?
Where do the adults go at night and what happens to the boys when
their numbers start to dwindle? Where are the men? Do men even
exist in this strange carnival of the absurd? Nobody asks, so we
watch with Max and wonder.

Rather than remaining complaisant in his baffled state, Max
rejects the ubiquitous absurdity by plotting a daring escape. The
payoff of “Evolution” comes not from any firm explanation, but the
instinctive response to a bad situation. As Max recognizes he
needs to get away, the movie’s title starts to make sense. This is
the story of evolving consciousness that leads to the birth of
skepticism — and, more specifically, a mistrusting of authorities
that yields the desire to seek out a better world. In a twisted
way befitting of such a gleefully fucked-up premise, it’s the
first feel good movie of a dark holiday season.